As of yesterday, October 15, the Senate had confirmed 152 of President Trump’s judicial nominations. 2 Associate Supreme Court Justices (Kavanaugh and Gorsuch,) 43 Appeals Court Judges, 105 District Judges, and 2 International Trade Court Judges.
The winning is continuing, right now. They’ve confirmed 3 more District Court judges and are voting on one more.
Related: Do District Court Judges Have More Power Than The Chief Justice and Maybe the President?
Under President Trump, even the “nutty Ninth” has started coming around, having given him a partial Asylum Policy Victory. These 155 (soon to be 156,) judges are changing the judicial landscape back from the Obama era (and prior) judicial activism to which we had started to grow accustomed. Judges and Justices are supposed to neutral arbiters of the law and the Constitution, not a sidekick for a legislature that postures more than prescribes. Not that I want the legislature to do more, no, I want judges to do less.
Trump was elected in large part because of his promise to appoint Constitution upholding Justices to our Supreme Court, even providing a list of who was on his short list prior to the election. For many, this was enough to vote for him (or against Her.) Of course, this just shows how backwards the whole system has gotten, for a Supreme Court should never have grown so powerful that Presidential elections were swayed by a mere promise to appoint Justices to uphold the Constitution.
Hopefully, with all of these new confirmations, we will start to see our system of check and balances restored, where the judiciary truly does become (again) a neutral arbiter of the Constitution. We’ve got a much better shot of that happening that a legislative branch that stops delegating away its authority to unelected bureaucrats, at least.
Update: Judge #156 was confirmed by the Senate 88-3 (P. Kovner to be US District Judge for Eastern New York – Senate Cloakroom Twitter)